rmsgrey wrote:My guess: first time it happens, media outrage! Parents concerned! Splashy headlines! Second time around, without the shock value that a game that has players take on the role of a professional thug and rewards them for massacring bystanders, killing cops, and generally being a violent criminal also has a minigame for having consensual sex in the context of a relationship. Without that shock value, and without any on-screen action, what's the story? "Parents fail to read back of game case"?

Not bad guesses. I suppose you right? Anyways, games often... exotic up others' cultures especially white peoples' games... making blacks into tribal savages or urban OGs? Kinda weird, odd and strange that... white men are sometimes criminals yet. Never quite as over the top as black peoples' savages and criminals? I not saying... it's true of, like, every game and even the series we talking about had white male protagonists just. I see the exotic upping of black tribes in RPGs a lot. The orcs' original skin tones were even... brown, like real brown peoples' and some black peoples', skin tones... and those were monstrous later turned green skins orcs? Not humans? Anyways so: Other cultures especially black women's and men's cultures get treat badly in games I feel. Just my thoughts love them or leave them? Ha-ha. :D

Amy Lee wrote:Just what we all need... more lies about a world that never was and never will be.

Azula to Long Feng wrote:Don't flatter yourself, you were never even a player.

Izawwlgood wrote:Is anyone else annoyed by the seeming trend in MMOs of eliminating the holy trinity, such that the only obstacle to success is 'more dakka'? I feel like there's a lot of room to share role burden, and maybe making it so everyone can do a little of everything is fine, but a lot of the games that I've been seeing over the last few years seem to have more or less completely done away with all notions of role diversity.

In a tabletop game, screw the Trinity; everyone play what you want, and I'll write a damned fine story to suit what you've made.

In an MMO, the Trinity is important. For soloing or questing, any classes/roles should be able to handle it, and for that, you need a little overlap like self-heals and aggro-dump abilities, but in a dungeon or raid, teamwork is the real challenge. If five characters who can tank, heal, and DPS at the same time go into a dungeon, it's boring, and the one good player can easily carry the rest.

Focusing on your role makes the cooperative experience worthwhile. I remember when World of Warcraft first introduced the concept of Heroic-level dungeons. They were hard. Not only did you have to know your role, but you had to be good at it, too. And even then, you had to try, and everyone had to be on the same page.

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I've found that roles only really matter in dungeons, raids and PVP battlegrounds on my little game. Just questing for your Artifacts Weapons and whatnot? You can tank, heal and DPS. Yourself. I've even solo take on like, five or six enemies, with just my li'l gnomish holy priestess. In dungeons tho' I got to know my roles. Healing is really, really truly difficult. I like doing damages better. I use my destruction warlock blood elf lady/woman/girl to blast them with Shadowburns, Rains of Hellfire, Chaos Bolts... Cataclysms? And the AOEs definitely help me take on multiple mobs at once yet: One stray enemy gets out, ppls not doing their tanking DPSing or healing and... I die, die, die really fast and quick regardless what classes I picked.

Amy Lee wrote:Just what we all need... more lies about a world that never was and never will be.

Azula to Long Feng wrote:Don't flatter yourself, you were never even a player.

In dungeons, roles seem to matter more for large pulls than single, powerful ones. When Zul'Aman (I think - it was one of the raids-turned-heroics) was formatted for 5-man heroics, I tanked it on my warrior. We got to the last boss (the shapeshifting one), and everyone else died almost instantly. With my health-leeching and self-healing, I managed to solo the boss. It took forever, and I should have just wiped so everyone could participate, but I wanted to see if I could do it.

I shouldn't have been able to, but the game had been gradually shifting toward self-sufficient characters for so long that I just had to remember when to use my self-healing abilities, and it was a foregone conclusion.

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Yeah, from a design perspective, varied roles such that no one character can cover everything sufficiently is crucial to designing a multiplayer game (as opposed to a single-player game where you can team up with other people and play together). The trouble with such an intrinsically multiplayer setup is that it means some players are forced to adopt roles other than their preferred in order to enable a party to succeed. Also, players who have trouble finding a group to play with will have a worse time, and a group only missing one role will still have to take pot luck on random strangers to find someone actually competent who can fill that role...

Allowing players to build characters capable of covering all roles (just barely) is going to mean that players have more freedom in party composition, but also means that players will potentially be able to solo the game by doing extra grinding to stay ahead of the level curve...

rmsgrey wrote:Allowing players to build characters capable of covering all roles (just barely) is going to mean that players have more freedom in party composition, but also means that players will potentially be able to solo the game by doing extra grinding to stay ahead of the level curve...

While I still very much prefer a setup that requires varied roles to succeed in situations like dungeons, I'm much more accepting of a game that rewards a player with that level of power due to grinding or even blind luck than I am of one that rewards a player for handing over $19.95 for a gear upgrade pack or something similar.

Of course, take all the money you can for things like cosmetic changes, race and server changes, pets and mounts, whatever ... Just don't give out anything that provides an actual in-game advantage to someone willing to spend the money. I understand it's a perfectly viable business model, but it completely turns me off.

One exception is if the game is free-to-play with no restrictions up to a certain level and then has a subscription model for higher-level content.

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Oh, sorry, I absolutely should have specified that this only applies to MMOs.

I liked the way Rift did it, and each class has specs available that let them do any role (dps, tank, support, heals). I'd be cool if games came up with more roles! But I find ditching the roles entirely to be less fun. GW2 kind of abandoned it, but someone spec'd for heals is usually required for some of the later dungeons, though it still doesn't feel like classically keeping the party alive. Black Desert Online does the more dakka routine where a few classes have tank or heal 'trends'.

I did a Pathfinder play by post recently and took a few heal/support spells, and ended up barely needing them. It was disappointing.

... with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.

Ginger wrote:Blizzard gets me with their in game shop's items so, so much... and it's like: $60-65 dollars to go straight up boosting to 110? Why Blizz why?

Hmmm ... Two hours of work to buy my way to max level or a few days of grinding and instancing to get there. It may be counter-intuitive, but as much as I hate leveling now (since I've done it so much), I would still rather put in the time than hand over the money.

Izawwlgood wrote:Oh, sorry, I absolutely should have specified that this only applies to MMOs.

It's a little disheartening to be in a group where the designated "healer" decides he's just going to DPS in Shadow-spec rather than heal in Holy because "it'll be faster that way." It's also disheartening to see a traditional Tank-Healer-3 DPS group where everyone is max level except one DPS who is only level 20, and that level 20 is second on the DPS meter because he's the new race/class/whatever and is wearing the best gear he could buy with real money.

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Yablo wrote:It's a little disheartening to be in a group where the designated "healer" decides he's just going to DPS in Shadow-spec rather than heal in Holy because "it'll be faster that way."

In most situations I would be surprised if this worked.

Yablo wrote:and that level 20 is second on the DPS meter because he's the new race/class/whatever and is wearing the best gear he could buy with real money.

I have never seen this happen, and would find that to be terrible game design if it did. Even at the height of Rift's cash grab, when they were selling heirloom lvl capped adaptive gear and just released a new class, it wasn't that bad.

... with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.

Ginger wrote:Blizzard gets me with their in game shop's items so, so much... and it's like: $60-65 dollars to go straight up boosting to 110? Why Blizz why?

Oh, in a lot of cases, I think the grind to cap is tedious and unneccesary, especially if you've already done it on a couple of characters, and if all the content is aimed for characters at cap. I don't find a bunch of 'kill six $thing' quests to be particularly interesting at any point, nor do I think the grind to cap is particularly entertaining.

It's training. It's to make sure you understand your class, and in most cases, it's clear that most players who get to cap still don't, so, as a training mechanism is kind of a poor one.

... with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.

Oh yes, I agree: Much better contents, dungeons, PVP battlegrounds and raids and scenarios from Pandaria and Pet Battles? So, much better at 110. So I pay anyways, whenever I can like, afford it and not overspends? Anyways, I agree too re: Training you to use your class by grinding to level caps is tedious, boring and makes me want to sleepy times. So I pay to have a better experiences and I am. I've done Maw of Souls on Heroic difficulty already and beat up Helya twice. I am not saying I am an awesome player woman yet: If I can learn my class by dying a lot at max levels why can't other players if they got the cash? So I feel: No shame.

Amy Lee wrote:Just what we all need... more lies about a world that never was and never will be.

Azula to Long Feng wrote:Don't flatter yourself, you were never even a player.

Yablo wrote:and that level 20 is second on the DPS meter because he's the new race/class/whatever and is wearing the best gear he could buy with real money.

I have never seen this happen, and would find that to be terrible game design if it did. Even at the height of Rift's cash grab, when they were selling heirloom lvl capped adaptive gear and just released a new class, it wasn't that bad.

The reason I was so specific is that it happened to a World of Warcraft group I was in a couple days ago. Granted, it was a Valentine's Day holiday event rather than an actual dungeon, but yeah. It was a level 20 Warlock of whatever the new Elf race is.

New races and classes are almost always terribly overpowered until things have a chance to balance. The same thing happened with Monks and Death Knights.

When Wrath of the Lich King came out, I had pretty much given up on everything but PvP for a while. I had top of the line PvP gear on my level 80 Mage, and I was out minding my own business (on a PvP server). A little gnome Mage waited until I had a large group of spiders I was fighting, and he jumped me. I froze the spiders, turned, and one-shotted the gnome. The gnome went and got his level 68-ish Death Knight guildie (or maybe it was his alt), and he proceeded to murder me about 5 or 6 times in a row.

I know balance is something that has to work itself out, and it's a never-ending process, but still ... There are test servers for a reason. Balance should never be that off, even with a brand new race or class, and it happens every time.

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And as to MMORPGs fantasy genre in general: Stop with so much magics, elves and even some high convoluted technology babbles they do. I like sci fi, I like high fantasies I just: No more skinny, anorexic elves. I'd even take undead, ogres or bug ladies and women over... skinny, magic addicted elves. Or high convoluted engineering that doesn't even follow real sciences?

Amy Lee wrote:Just what we all need... more lies about a world that never was and never will be.

Azula to Long Feng wrote:Don't flatter yourself, you were never even a player.

Yablo wrote:The reason I was so specific is that it happened to a World of Warcraft group I was in a couple days ago. Granted, it was a Valentine's Day holiday event rather than an actual dungeon, but yeah. It was a level 20 Warlock of whatever the new Elf race is.

Weird and disappointing.

... with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.

Gnomes are already least represented in Blizzard's game. And, like, totally I agree with adding leper gnomes. A lot a lot of them were irradiated in the fall of Gnomeregan, which is a silly name for your race's capitol but yo? What you gonna do? *Shrugs her bony shoulders a bit.* Anyways, the starting quests in Gnomeregan for gnomes tell entirely how, you irradiated and in danger of becoming a 'degenerate leper gnome,' so: Why not add leper gnomes to the Alliance's forces? Gross green radiation Gnomes For the Alliance's glories and victories in future wars! /me cheers for the leper gnomes!

Amy Lee wrote:Just what we all need... more lies about a world that never was and never will be.

Azula to Long Feng wrote:Don't flatter yourself, you were never even a player.

I like StarCraft and all... but... managing all my li'l bugs/Zergs, my base AND expanding my territories with patrolling soldiers? No. No way. I can barely keep up with upgrading my main hive, spawning new and creative Zergs... I just get to Hydralisks stages of development and it seems like my enemies have no troubles beating me with regular Terran marines or whatever. I just... can only play one character at a time? Like in an MMORPG. One pretty, nice, prettily femme avatar for me, not what seems like: Hundreds of tiny little bugs all clamoring for my attentions, which are fragmented and split as it is. Nice try Blizzard yet no chocolate bars for you guys and girls?

Amy Lee wrote:Just what we all need... more lies about a world that never was and never will be.

Azula to Long Feng wrote:Don't flatter yourself, you were never even a player.

Yeah, I was never into the real time part of real time strategy. It adds a layer of multitasking that, in my opinion, reduces the strategy part. I can handle real time strategy games if they have the pause-and-queue-commands interface.

That's why I like JRPG strategy games. Because at least with a pretty boy named Beowulf or whatever riding a chocobo, you can pause him when it's his turn, choose his actions and then he takes his turn, the female knight lady takes her turn and the enemies take their turns. All nicely and orderly. And the chocobo even gets a turn if it's a regular character, which is very... awesomely cute like.

Amy Lee wrote:Just what we all need... more lies about a world that never was and never will be.

Azula to Long Feng wrote:Don't flatter yourself, you were never even a player.

New User wrote:Yeah, I was never into the real time part of real time strategy. It adds a layer of multitasking that, in my opinion, reduces the strategy part. I can handle real time strategy games if they have the pause-and-queue-commands interface.

Same here. The only real value I see in real time strategy is that it forces the player to think quickly and recognize certain basic and complex situations.

Many years ago, a friend and I would play chess all the time, but our games would take forever. We would take five minutes or more analyzing every possible move before eventually going with our first instinct anyway. One day, we got a chess clock and we played dozens of fast, timed games. After a week or so of that, we played without the clock, and our regular games were so much faster.

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Ginger wrote:I like StarCraft and all... but... managing all my li'l bugs/Zergs, my base AND expanding my territories with patrolling soldiers? No. No way. I can barely keep up with upgrading my main hive, spawning new and creative Zergs... I just get to Hydralisks stages of development and it seems like my enemies have no troubles beating me with regular Terran marines or whatever. I just... can only play one character at a time? Like in an MMORPG. One pretty, nice, prettily femme avatar for me, not what seems like: Hundreds of tiny little bugs all clamoring for my attentions, which are fragmented and split as it is. Nice try Blizzard yet no chocolate bars for you guys and girls?

You might like to try the custom maps I made:Small Squad Tactical MapsThey're really just the regular maps, but the mineral piles are dramatically reduced, and the custom settings make it so your excess Vespene gas will slowly trade into more minerals when you are low. Territory matters a lot, since even a depleted geyser is pretty valuable.Keeping your peeps alive and repair/healing is important.And seeing a single battlecruiser is very scary in those games.

(note: the first file there, "(7)The dying of the light.zip" is the opposite; you and any of your friends start with a million minerals, and then the tap of zerglings gets turned on and you see how many you can fend off before the screen completely fills with purple.)

FlightGear 2018.1's Hurricane with no joystick and insufficient idea how to use the mouse as a yoke handles quite a lot like Acorn Aviator used to. I think it makes takeoffs and landings even harder, though.

Well I was really enjoying Pillars of Eternity 2 until real life happened in a big way. It's like what reviewers are saying, they improved every single aspect and it's a wholly better game. Some combat imbalance but whatever. I really love the different factions. The leaders are each compelling, and they're all in a war over the archipelagos. The Vailian are after money and exploiting the new resource in the name of progress, because the resource itself is doing so much good. The Royal Deadfire just want to slow down the Vailian's corruption of the natural order, and as a side benefit, build up their empire and claim territory back from all the factions -- back into the Rauatai empire. The Huana have been at war with the Rauatai empire over the archipelagos since long before the resource was discovered, but now the stakes are high. The Huana aren't entirely sure what to do, and their empire is on the verge of collapse but they're too proud to see it. Then there's the Principi. Lawful evil. Pirates. They're the first faction to lend you a hand, so they seem alright, but...

I mean... buckle up if you thought Skyrim's civil war was interesting.

I haven't had a chance to check out the second one yet, but the first Pillars of Eternity was great (I've been playing too much Battletech in the few free summer moments I have). If the new one is even a little better, it's totally worth getting.

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I almost went the Battletech route too, but I decided against it because I couldn't find any videos demonstrating that the AI was interesting, or that you ever felt like you were among powerful mechs that dwarfed the Earth. The battles in Battletech all look like rock-'em-sock-'em slugfests. My flavor of mechs is more like WW2 battle tanks, more like real life. A scout can't do much by itself in the majority of circumstances, but given the right positioning and opportunity, a T-70 could take out 5 stugs by itself, whereas if they were to face head-on 1-on-1 the stug would be highly favored and expected to win. I really don't get that impression in Battletech. It feels more like you need to use the terrain to survive the war of attrition, and that you're always roughly evenly matched. You might be outnumbered, but since the enemy seemed to single-file into you in every single video I found, it's like you're never really powerful and never really weak. Do you ever see little people running around? Do you ever see full military helicopters flying around like they were drones? I hear there are tanks but they're still kind of hard to kill. One big slugfest. Please tell me it has a lot more variety and I'm wrong. I also heard about how the kill-command-whatever thing works, and I'm sure that sort of snowball mechanic definitely helps with the problem I'm seeing, but, eh... Like bandaging a laceration and broken bone. You're just going to have to cut it open again if you ever want to fix the bone as well.

I tried Tooth And Tail since it's the free weekend. I went into ranked multiplayer completely blind. What a simple and fun RTS. I had a lot of back-and-forth and small skirmishes and stuff, and it all felt very natural. Games don't last much more than 10 minutes. It's definitely a well designed game, boiled down to the most very basics of what makes RTS fun. I had fun. The only place I could see improvement is that It could use some resolution, a little bit more color. Touch-up the visual design a little everywhere. I'd probably use a watercolor aesthetic, but with sharp edges.

Oh, look at that, the game is practically dead though. Weird, it's almost like people enjoy complexity. People want more than simple mobile games, regardless of how well designed they are. People actually don't mind clicking a lot if it is the only means of interacting with the complexity that they enjoy.

It's almost like some people accept that in order to succeed spectacularly, they must also be allowed to fail spectacularly... And that it's not about being the best, but overcoming yesterday's challenge.

You're free to pick your own handicap level, I have mine, but for God's sake don't disparage the games I enjoy simply because I like the training wheels mostly off. I guarantee you that there is far more strategy in any single game of Starcraft than any other RTS, and that's why it's the reigning king of its genre. As much fun as I had with T&T, after two games, I feel like I have experienced the majority of what the game has to offer in terms of strategic complexity.Not directed at you necessarily, just something I really want to say to many different people, most of which aren't on this forum.

The enemy AI in Battletech seems fine to me. It focuses fire intelligently, uses terrain, doesn't seem to make many stupid mistakes, etc.

Gameplay can feel a bit like an attrition slugfest at times, but positioning and tactics are still very important and can allow Light mechs to take on Assaults if used intelligently. (in particular, the AI seems a lot more adept than me at using the light mechs and the initiative system) The stability and evasion mechanics, coupled with the lack of any kind of 'overwatch' ability, really incentivizes you to keep moving and re-positioning. Standing still and trying to ambush enemy units is generally not a great tactic here.

Tanks can be hard to kill, but it mostly comes down to positioning and terrain not letting you use your weapons effectively against them, a single solid hit will pretty much always destroy a tank, or you can just step on them. There aren't any aircraft or little people running around, unfortunately, but you can walk through building and watch them crumple, and there are plenty of trees to tower over and crush like twigs.

There's definitely some special sauce missing though, I got bored with the campaign about halfway through, downloading mods to add a panic system and to make the mech outfitting system work the way it should helped, but ultimately I'll probably play Xcom 2 a few more times before I come back to Battletech.

Roosevelt wrote:

I wrote:Does Space Teddy Roosevelt wrestle Space Bears and fight the Space Spanish-American War with his band of Space-volunteers the Space Rough Riders?

One character in Gondor, before the battle of Minas Tirith. Ash falling everywhere. Another in West Rohan, before the battle of Helm's Deep. Ash falling there, too. Hadn't noticed it before. It's supposed to be ash from Mt Doom, which has been darkening the sky for a while. They wouldn't shut up about the lack of sunlight in Gondor. It looks wrong, though. It's big flakes of ash, drifting down, not the gritty, powdery ash I'd expect from a volcanic eruption, and nobody's choking on it. It's more like paper ash from a bundle of old newspaper on a bonfire or ...

I've been playing The Witcher 3, and it's pretty great so far. The only real complaint is that every monster has a level, so fights can be arbitrarily very hard or very easy. I've been doing some of the side quests that I had previously ignored, and since I'm ten levels higher than the recommended level I one-shot everything. It would have been nice to scale the monsters up a bit to match the player level. After you track a giant boss to its lair, it's not satisfying to kill it in two hits.

Another weird thing about the game is that the primary method of combat underwater is... a crossbow. Would that even work? I guess harpoon guns are a thing, but it seems like if you took a normal crossbow underwater it wouldn't be very effective.

The thing I found with the Witcher 3 is that it was pretty tough early on. Levels were slow to come and you'd frequently run into groups of ghouls and things at double your level.Then once you get to about level 10 or so, the game sort of becomes easy - you get access to a lot more quests near your level and after a while you start finding yourself way over-leveled.But I don't worry about fighting monsters with the red skull, unless it's a large group - it just means the fight may take some time.(Caveat, I haven't played on Death March, but whatever the difficulty below it is called).

And yeah, underwater combat is weird - the crossbow basically one-shots everything whilst doing basically no damage on land.But I don't mind; I'd rather not have long or complicated fights underwater - underwater combat and movement sucks in basically every game it's been implemented in.

Witcher 3's late game is all about stacking bonuses so that you can continue to one-shot things or otherwise kill very rapidly. That's how you tackle death march.

If you do only story missions, you'll find that the game is slightly difficult but doable. You can also completely ignore the story missions and do only contracts and side missions. Doing the story missions and some contracts makes the game a bit easy, but doing everything in one playthrough? I did it, but I was very disengaged and listening to podcasts towards the end. I wanted to continue playing the game, it wasn't necessarily an obsession to fully complete it, but I swore to never do that again.

Also I think the water has a higher viscosity and a stronger surface tension on the macro scale, then much higher superfluidity on the micro scale. That's why the water behaves in weird ways sometimes, and why crossbow bolts cut through it, and why there are giant krakens and so on. Yeah. I would prefer if the surface crossbow did more damage but I can see how easy it would be to exploit the combat system with it. If all you needed to do is keep dodging and shooting then it would make 95% of the combat irrelevant. There are mods that try to strike a balance though, and there is that mutation in Blood and Wine.